...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
Sylvia PlathRead
We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.
Interpretation
We understand concepts through their contrasts and opposites.
This quote by Sylvia Plath explores the idea that our comprehension of certain concepts is inherently tied to their opposites. It suggests that we define and appreciate qualities, such as warmth or goodness, only after experiencing their counterparts, like coldness or badness. Therefore, our understanding of love is intertwined with our awareness of hate, highlighting the relational nature of human experience and knowledge.
In practice
During a speech on human experiences, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of adversity in understanding joy.
...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted & spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?
I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb.
It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual.
You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.
In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions.
We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.
The purpose of soul questions is to open yourself deeper and deeper until all that is left is the power and beauty you are bringing to the lives of others.
There where hundreds of graves. There where hundreds of women. There were hundreds of daughters. There were hundreds of sons. And hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands of candles. The whole graveyard was one swarm of candleshine as if a population of fireflies had heard of a Grand Conglomeration and had flown here to settle in and flame upon the stones and light the brown faces and the dark eyes and the black hair.
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
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